Canciones Sacrae 1625

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Heinrich Schütz's Cantiones sacrae of 1625, from his 40th year (the middle of the road of life), stand apart from his other works. A group of some 40 four-voice motets (11 are presented here), they fall neither among the composer's splendid German adaptations of the Venetian polychoral style nor among the severe, stripped-down pieces he wrote late in life. They are also, intriguingly, neither really Protestant nor Catholic; written for a Catholic prince, they are in Latin, but they draw on a group of meditative texts, adapted from the Bible, that were used by members of both faiths. They are inward works that owe a great deal to Renaissance polyphony but are marked as part of Schütz's own time by their intense text expressivity and by madrigalian chromaticism applied with climactic effect.

Heinrich Schütz's Cantiones sacrae of 1625, from his 40th year (the middle of the road of life), stand apart from his other works. A group of some 40 four-voice motets (11 are presented here), they fall neither among the composer's splendid German adaptations of the Venetian polychoral style nor among the severe, stripped-down pieces he wrote late in life. They are also, intriguingly, neither really Protestant nor Catholic; written for a Catholic prince, they are in Latin, but they draw on a group of meditative texts, adapted from the Bible, that were used by members of both faiths. They are inward works that owe a great deal to Renaissance polyphony but are marked as part of Schütz's own time by their intense text expressivity and by madrigalian chromaticism applied with climactic effect.